Modern Europe and Clashing Cultures in the New World
English 2210, World Literature II:
In addition to reading major contributors to modern European cultural history like Montaigne, Moliere, Wollstonecraft, Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and Freud, we will focus on the clash of cultures in the New World and that clash’s continuing effects on both colonizers and colonized even into our postcolonial era. We will read Aphra Behn’s imaginary slave narrative Oroonoko, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity among the Wampanoag, and Black Elk’s and Harriet Jacobs’s life stories. Then we will read theorists of the postcolonial era (Du Bois, Gandhi, Fanon, King) and stories of its everyday realities in the U.S. today by Baldwin, Silko, O’Brien, Cisneros and Alexie.
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Last updated October 10, 2004